Around The Sun

Last week I celebrated my birthday for the 67th time. It is a weird thing to be this age as underneath the senior discount, the wrinkles, and tired eyes is an undersized ten year old girl with a face full of freckles, an overbite, and hair her mother couldn’t get to lay down without a generous helping of Dippety Doo.

The day before my birthday, after cleaning and organizing the pantry after work, all I wanted to do was to take a hot bath with a glass of wine. That got put on hold after my daughter called to tell me her youngest was in the ER after days of throwing up. She wanted to join her husband and said, “It’s okay if you don’t want to, you can say no.” I have not forgotten how scary it is to have to take a sick baby to the hospital so I got in the car and drove over to watch the big kids. She got back after eleven, her husband still with the baby who was getting an IV, my sedate evening plans dashed.

The next day I ran errands, and as I was leaving the house, heard the sirens of a fire truck that sounded like it was getting closer and closer. I stood by my car door to see where it was going and watched as it turned down my street. We have a neighbor who has MS that we all look out for so when it didn’t stop at her house I let out a breath. Mary was okay. The truck instead stopped at the house of a man who has been rather reclusive. His parents lived in the house for decades and when they died he moved in. He’d wave on the rare occasions when he’d drive by in his truck but other than that he was rarely seen. The fire department didn’t act like it was an emergency and I assumed it was for a furnace check or something related.

I went about my day checking things off my list. I swung by my daughter’s house with lunch for me and her husband and rocked their sick bambino to sleep so his dad could take a work call. He fell fast asleep, and I gently lowered him into his crib and drove home. The police were at the house the fire department had been at earlier and the next-door neighbor was outside. I walked over to ask him what happened, and he told me that when he hadn’t seen Steve’s truck move for a few days he got worried. He checked his front door camera to verify and sure enough he was correct – the truck had not left the driveway for three days. He went in the unlocked front door and found Steve dead on the floor upstairs. “I called 9-1-1,” he said, “and they told me they’d send someone right over but, in the meantime, said to roll him on his back.” I told them, “He’s dead. There’s no point in doing that.” This was not the story I imagined and as we were talking my neighbor said, “Looks like they’re taking him out now,” as a stretcher went down the stairs, the reclusive neighbor covered with a sheet and headed to the morgue.

Late that afternoon I got a text from my son offering me dinner. I declined and texted DO NOT FEEL GUILTY. I took my delayed hot bath with a glass of wine and was in bed by 9:30 with a book and my emotional support heating pad. The next day I woke to my chirping alarm, rolled on to my back, and took the first breath of the day. My immediate thought was what a gift the days before had been – to watch big kids and rock sick ones, to clean a pantry and run errands, to love and be loved by your people. There have been many recent years when I wished for none of it, when I was engulfed by loneliness and sadness, but that little girl with the freckles, overbite, and wild hair always had to chime in with her ever optimistic, “Happy birthday to us!!! This is the day Mom makes us our favorite dinner and bakes us a cake.”

I am thankful that little girl still weighs in. As for her mom, she would spend another day in memory care not knowing she had a daughter who had a birthday or that she had two other daughters and three sons. But none of us have forgotten how much she loved the little and grown up versions of us extra special on our birthdays.

Somewhere I think there’s a signed agreement that says we aren’t allowed to waste that.